A few days ago, I posted a query regarding a reference which our local
interlibrary loans people could not locate. It turned out to be a
faulty reference indeed (and quite faulty at that). For those of you
who are curious to find out, I got the reference from Michael
S. Gazzaniga's *Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking,
Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence* (New York, Basic
Books). In his endnotes (p. 208), Gazzaniga refers to a paper by
Stephen Pinker and Paul Bloom ("Natural language and natural
selection", in *Behavioral and Brain Sciences* 13:4 (1990)). The page
numbers for that reference (723-724: two pages??) ought to have made
me wary. Anyway, Pinker and Bloom (whose paper I haven't seen myself)
seem to refer to the Bates paper I was interested in; Gazzaniga claims
he found it in their work, and he used some of Bates e.a.'s examples
as reported by Pinker and Bloom (without checking the source,
apparently, or else he would not have copied a faulty reference). The
correct reference is as follows:
Bates, Elizabeth, Thal, D., & Marchman, V. (1991). Symbols and
syntax: A Darwinian approach to language development. In Norman
A. Krasnegor, Duane M. Rumbaugh,
Richard L. Schiefelbusch and Michael. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and
behavioral determinants of language development (pp.29-65). Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
My sincere thanks to all of the following:
Claudia BRUGMAN
Mike FLYNN
Gary HOLDEN
Rachel LAGUNOFF
Beth LEVIN
John O'NEIL
Meiti OPIE (Elizabeth Bates' research assistant)
Marilyn SILVA
Gordon WILCOX
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Dr Bert Peeters
Department of Modern Languages (French)
University of Tasmania
GPO Box 252C Tel. (002) 202344 +61 02 202344
Hobart TAS 7001 Fax. (002) 207813 +61 02 207813
Australia Email: Bert.Peetersmodlang.utas.edu.au